People currently enjoy the ability to communicate and remain relatively connected with others regardless of location. For example, many personal communication devices (e.g., Smartphones, tablet computers, etc.) allow users to make and receive voice calls with other remote parties, access the Internet, send and receive email, visit social network pages, and the like. However, the technology that facilitates these capabilities is complex and sometime problematic.
For example, each of the above-mentioned services usually has a unique user level application executing on the device. Social media applications such as FACEBOOK and TWITTER have their own applications that provide user access to that service. A user's email program would also have its own unique user-level application to provide users access to their email, as would the user's phone application. These applications are, by and large, independent of each other. Therefore, they may not communicate or share user-centric data with each other (e.g., contact lists, user IDs, passwords, etc.) unless they are integrated or specifically configured to perform those functions. Such independence can lead to many sets of the same or similar data distributed across many different devices.
Further, users can interact with different application programs, but only by ceasing interaction with one application program in favor of interacting with another. More particularly, users generally select different windows to switch between different application programs, or worse, close one application down to execute another. Such constraints are burdensome on the user, especially on devices having relatively small display screens, such as cellular telephones, for example. These problems, however, can be addressed, at least in part, with cloud computing.
Cloud computing is a term that describes “on-demand” computational resources that are available from a computer network. Such resources include, but are not limited to, hardware, computing power, software services, applications, and files. With cloud computing, a user device connected to the network (i.e., “the Cloud”) can access and use different services without having the necessary hardware and/or software resident on their local device. For example, GOGGLE offers GMAIL—a cloud-based service in which the application that provides the user with access to his/her e-mail, as well as the user's information (e.g., address book, etc.), is all on-line within the computer network.
In the future, many services will be cloud-based, and will be able to share user-centric data. Thus, users will create and maintain only a single ID, password, enabler, contact list, etc., that replaces all the previous IDs, passwords, enablers, contact lists, etc. Because the data is cloud-based, users will also be able to access any of this information from any device so long as the device has a communication session established with the cloud computing network. A user interface that helps the user access these resources and services would therefore be helpful.